A masterpiece, pretty much. Guido (Roberto Benigni) uses his extraordinary imagination to protect his young son from the reality of living in a Nazi concentration camp by presenting the whole thing as an elaborate game in which he has to score 1,000 points to win. The film begins as a gentle romantic comedy (Benigni’s real-life wife Nicoletta Braschi plays Dora, the woman he woos and marries) that’s full of frothy slapstick, and ingenious connections between threads of the story enhanced by Guido’s quick thinking. The hilarious opening section means that the sudden switch to the deeply serious second half is all the more powerful. The astonishing performance by the couple’s young son Giosuè (Giorgio Cantarini) makes the sense of innocence under threat absolutely gut-wrenching. It’s a dazzling film about the power of love, hope and the human imagination.
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